Thinking about hashtags 🧠#️⃣

I've been running a crawler to find hastags on gemini for a couole of years now.

(FAQ about that)

I'm wondering whether to continue. Hashtags do get some use, but they haven't taken off as they have in other spaces. My index includes other kinds of tagging, but they aren't widely used either. There are currently 10,743 tags, and the crawler has considered 731,941 URLs, which gives an idea of the scale of indifference.

The crawler is a few bash scripts, and its surprising that it works at all. There are issues with the crawler. It doesn't understand redirects (which I've known for ages, but they're no so widely used that I've had to fix it), nor does it understand rate limiting, beyond ignoring for ever any capsule that returns a 44. It never revisits a URL, so never notices updates, or pages and capsules disappearing.

The display of tags is not so great: one very big page of every tag, and one fairly big page of 'popular' tags. That could be broken up a bit, maybe by first character. And the links could do with titles instead of a plain link.

My client links hashtags in gemini pages, but I'm not aware that any others do. Hashtags are a bit useless unless you can click through to see what others have said.

Hmm, does anyone find the tags useful? I think that unless some people do, I might stop the crawl. The other option is to fix some of the crawler's issues and tell it to recrawl geminispace from scratch.

#hashtags

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